


breaking all of the rules

by impulserun



Series: we'll be fine [10]
Category: Avengers Academy (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 03:22:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12290151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impulserun/pseuds/impulserun
Summary: “Peggy?” Steve asks. “Peggy’s here?”On the other side of campus, Peggy gasps.  “Steve’s alive?”





	breaking all of the rules

**Author's Note:**

> sorry for the lengthy radio silence!! uni kicked me in the butt real bad

[Tony Stark, 12.06pm] CAP

[Tony Stark, 12.06pm] CAP I FUCKED UP

[Tony Stark, 12.06pm] CAP PLS REPLY ME

[Tony Stark, 12.06pm] I KNOW U KNOW HOW TO TEXT

[Tony Stark, 12.06pm] CAP

[Tony Stark, 12.06pm] STEVE

[Tony Stark, 12.06pm] PLS

[Tony Stark, 12.06pm] DYING

[Steve Rogers, 12.08pm] Oh god, Tony. What have you done now?

*

The 21st century is at once both overwhelmingly different and a bit of a let-down. It’s something, she supposes, that comes with being a confidante of Howard Stark. When you’ve dealt with emotion-manipulating gas and dangerously unstable explosives, glass-panel skyscrapers and robot bartenders don’t quite cut it.

(Also, Howard has a statue. Of _course_.)

(… There’s one for Steve, too, and there’s even one for _her_ , of all people, but _still_.)

The air is different, somehow. Cleaner. Heavier on her tongue. Clothes are different, too; a young woman in black and yellow walks by, chattering on her phone, and Peggy struggles not to stare at her form-fitting black leather pants. (They do wonders for her legs – Peggy contemplates trying a pair on, briefly, before deciding against it. They don’t look particularly comfortable. Not from where she’s standing, at least.)

Then – suddenly –

“Peggy?” comes a familiar voice – one she thought she’d never hear again – she whirls on her feet, and there he is –

Steve.

In the war, there had been no room for weakness. Time and time again she had held herself back, hiding her fretting when a mission took too long, masking her concern behind practiced calm when Steve inevitably wound up in the medic’s tent.

Times are different now.

Peggy drops her mask, and allows herself to _feel_.

“ _Steve_!”

*

The afternoon passes by in a whirlwind of excitement. Steve, to his credit, has gotten better at dancing, for all his sheepish pre-emptive apologies for injured toes.

“It just doesn’t seem real,” she says. “One minute I’m in the forties dealing with Howard, the next I’m… _here_. And everyone I know is dead and gone.”

“Actually,” Steve says, rubbing his neck, “about that.”

It all comes out in an ungraceful, stumbling mess. Steve talks at length about HYDRA; Peggy’s blood _boils_. That the institution has survived to this day, that they were even given the opportunity to continue their atrocities, to set up shop as a _school_ – it makes her want to return to the ‘40s to set a politician or two on fire – but then Steve tells her about the Winter Soldier project. About Barnes.

“Barnes is alive? Barnes is _here_?” Peggy feels the sudden urge to smack him on the arm. “You could have told me that first, you oaf!”

“Sorry,” says Steve perfunctorily.

“How is he doing?”

“He sings a lot,” he says, shrugging, but then his face splits into a grin. “He actually doesn’t have class today – we could go see him now, if you wanted to.”

*

They chat about the state of current affairs – women can run for president now! Peggy wants to press for more details, but Steve gets suspiciously shifty-eyed, so she makes a mental note to herself to do some research on her own time – as they make their way to the stadium. Bucky hangs out there after class, Steve tells her, in a bid to derail her train of thought; it’s a pity that Peggy has always been able to see through his bullshit, because Steve might actually have gotten a mite better at lying.

“I wonder what the other me must have thought,” she muses, mind wandering back to the presidential elections. “Is she still around, by any chance?”

“I, uh, don’t think we’re allowed to tell you,” Steve says, faltering. “Alternate universes are one thing, but time travel…”

“Right,” she says. “Right. Of course.”

“You’ve – You do a lot, Peg, in the years between then and now. I read all about it.” Steve smiles at her again, and the way it lights up the world shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, but there’s poorly-hidden pain in his blue eyes, and it’s been so long, so long since she’d seen him smile, actually, properly smile –

To her relief, the stadium looms up before them. Steve holds the door open as they enter.

*

“He usually hangs out on top of the bleachers,” Steve explains, as he leads the way up the stairs. “He says it has the best view, whatever that means…. Oh. Oh no.”

Bucky’s eyes are, strangely enough, timefog purple. Not just his irises, which could’ve been explained away by contact lenses – no, even the whites of his eyes are full out purple.

“Oh no,” says Steve, face falling. “It’s happening again.”

“Time is dying by the hour,” he intones, unblinking. “We made it though, and that’s our power. Winter’s cold, we never cower. Leviathan. Devour, devour.”

“Is that a poem?” Peggy asks, voice hushed. “Did he just make it up?”

“He gets like this, sometimes,” Steve whispers back. “Buck’s real into poetry and song-writing these days, but – ever since we got him back from HYDRA, he gets these… flashes.”

“What the hell is Leviathan?”

“A really big whale,” Bucky says, blinking the fog away, and then he winces. “Fuck, ow.”

“Buck? Are you okay?”

“’Nother migraine. Be fine in a bit.”

“They’re getting more frequent,” Steve frets, pushing Bucky’s bangs away from his face. “Do you need a doctor? I think we should see a doctor. Do you know what year it is?”

“It’s 2016,” says Bucky, fond. “Get off me, Steve. I’m fine.” 

For one brief, agonising moment, Peggy is suddenly reminded of the forties. She remembers crowding around Steve’s bed in the medical bay after missions gone wrong and watching Sergeant Barnes tear into him for his carelessness. They’d been so _young_ – and they still _are_. Just two boys from Brooklyn, lost in time.

There’s a sudden lump in her throat – Peggy is thankful to escape to the blessed serenity of the Archives.

 _Leviathan_ , she thinks. _Time is dying by the hour_.

She turns her attention to the history section. There’s a mystery here for her to solve.

*

Later, when Peggy has returned from saving the space-time continuum, she drops in on her boys at Club A.

“Heya, Peg,” says Bucky, waving at her from his place at the bar. She picks her way through the crowd to join him.

“Sorry ‘bout earlier,” he says, when she’s placed her order. “Hope I didn’t freak you out, or anything.”

“Would you believe me if I told you I’ve seen worse?”

Bucky glances at her quizzically. “Howard?”

She sighs. “Howard.”

“So… he built another strange gun? A strange grenade, maybe?”

“If only.” Peggy sighs again, and tries firmly to push the memories of Item Number Two-One-Four-Oh-Five to the back of her mind. “If anything, losing both you _and_ Steve in such a short timeframe made him even worse than before. He got… creative. Viciously so.”

Bucky wrinkles his nose. “I’m not sure I want to know what happened.”

“You don’t.”

The sharp click-clacking sound of cue balls knocking against each other reverberates through the air, even over the heavy bass of… _whatever_ people are passing off as music these days. Steve glances up from his game, catches her eye, and grins bashfully as he ducks his head, returning to the game.

“Is he actually having fun?” she muses out loud, sipping her drink.

“Nah,” Bucky snorts. “He’s using the cue balls to figure out ricochet angles.”

That. That makes a disturbing amount of sense.

“And _then_ ,” he continues, smirking, “when Sam gets back from flight practice, Steve’s gonna kick his ass at pool.”

Peggy relaxes. “Now, _there’s_ the Steve Rogers I remember.”

**Author's Note:**

> i like to believe that bucky is the academy oracle, if only b/c his poems/songs/whatever he wants to call them are always somehow relevant to the event/situation at hand


End file.
